For the Love of the Game

The culture of soccer is beautiful. Excuse me, the culture of football is beautiful. There is a saying in sports that continues spirit, pride, and skill: “For the love of the game.” Down the road from our house is a football field. Field is a general term that denotes a playing surface on a flat plane of natural terrain – grass. However, field does not imply grass here. In fact, of the football ‘fields’ we have seen, a majority of them are deprived of grass or even weeds. These ‘fields’ are dirt. These fields are not flat. Some go up hill, some are side hilling. Some have small plateaus in the middle, side, or end of the ‘field’. The one down the street from us was flat for the most part. When it rains, it pours; this is not Autzen Stadium; the rain has eroded channels that give … texture … to the field, making it something of a minigolf course, but by no means is it unplayable. This is a well maintained field in comparison to some we have seen.

Every Monday night a game is held. From the information I gathered, players local to East Legon, Accra, and the greater Accra area come here most often. The players are good. These games are showcases. Sometimes professional players from Ghana come to play here; they are paying respect to the fields they grew up on and inspiring the children to continue the sport. They do this for the love of the game. On our first Monday, we were blessed with a special occasion.

We were also blessed to have a talented driver. The roads are lined with gutters a foot and a half deep and a foot wide. Grates bridge the road and what is on the side of the road, in our case this was a football field. The grates are precisely the width of a car. We asked Eric, the driver of our 25 foot bus, if it was possible to park on the field side of the gutter. A smile began to emerge from his dark and bubbly visage accompanied with a vocal expression for which I have yet to define: a mid-range pitch that climbed in accordance to the hight of his cheeks, with a fermata directed by a conductor whose baton circles for a close only after he is fully entertained with the curious request and has concluded in its possibility.

“aa’yeeessss”

I’m not sure how he got from one side to the other, but he did so in the manner that a semi-truck driver might parallel park a Mini Cooper: it was no problem.

We sat our obruni asses on top of the bus and watched the game.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I compiled this footage, which WordPress refuses to insert as a thumbnail video. Please click the link: Soccer Match

At the match were three professional players. Two of the players were from  the Ghana Black Stars, the national team. I was unable to get their names. The other was a player for the Togo national team and also played club for the Tottenham Hotspur, Emmanuel Adebayor.

I ended up meeting a man who claimed to be his personal DJ, Derek (aka DJ Boto). He climbed on the bus and began talking to me about Adebayor. I believed him when he said  they were close. I don’t believe he was just some looney fan. He was constantly talking back and forth with Adebayor during the game (nor just yelling/cheering) and he showed me photos and videos of the two of them. Derek kept telling me how nice Adebayor was, how he has foundations to build stoves in Togo, and how he just gives money away to his friends and family back home. Derek was sincere, but one of the videos was a bit silly:

“This is him handing out money in his backyard. He is so generous that he just hands it out.”

…video was a line of people in the backyard of a very nice house. At the front of the line is Adebayor, one by one, giving bills to each person in line. The video ended with Derek turning the camera on himself to selfie-video prove his involvement.

The game ended when the sky was too dark to play on. A crowd swarmed around the famous players. Then they had to leave. Traffic is bad enough in Ghana, but this was real bad. It was like a celebrity driving down the street after making a great appearance…

Adebayor left in a Bently.